A few days ago when I was working early in the morning,
I heard our dog, Coco, bark. There was nothing strange about that.
Whenever she was lonely, or desired attention, or wanted to go out in
the garden, she would often bark to let us know she was there. Neither
was there anything unusual about her barking at night. I almost always
work late into the early hours, and so she is used to nighttime company.

No, the strange thing was that I heard her bark when in
fact she had died two days earlier.

Now, I know what some of you must be thinking: "He's
finally lost it -- hearing animal voices in the night." Well, I might
agree with you, except that night I was working late with my eldest
daughter, Clair, on her college essay. We both heard Coco, and Clair has
heard her again since.

I have no explanation for this phenomenon. I know
psychologists would probably attribute it to delayed trauma or shock due
to bereavement, even the result of a suppressed subconscious. Perhaps
they're right (though that doesn't quite explain how we both heard it).
Perhaps it was nothing more than a sudden jolt due to unconscious
suppression.

But another thought occurs to me that I would like to
share with you. It is simply that religion and philosophy (and
psychology) have yet to grasp the complex spiritual relationship that we
have with animals. Although Descartes is dead, the idea that animals are
just automata has a strong pull on our minds. But as almost anyone who
has had a relationship with an animal knows, they are not just machines,
or even just flesh and blood; somehow animals have -- for want of a
better word -- "spirit."

After my book Animal Rites was published last year, I
received scores of letters from people who had recently lost their
companion animals. Many were deeply moving, even heartbreaking, and they
provided ample testimony to a deep sense of loss and, not least of all,
spiritual diminishment. An animal had not just died; an absence had
replaced a presence, a connection to another world had been severed
apparently forever.

Words are inadequate to characterize what I have called
the "spirit" of an animal. Suffice to say this: I hope that in all our
activities of protest, persuasion, and advocacy, we never lose the
insight that every creature has its own mysterious life that graces us
with its presence. Those who grieve for dead animals are often seen as
people with a "problem," as if grieving was somehow unnatural or
childish (which of course it isn't). In fact, such grief testifies to
something much deeper: that animals are more than most people commonly
imagine.

Jewish theologian Martin Buber once wrote of how we need
to establish "I/Thou" (rather than "I/It") relationships with other
creatures, and he gave as an example his own "deeply stirring" encounter
with a dapple grey horse in childhood. He wrote, "I must say that what I
experienced in touch with the animal was the Other, the immense
otherness of the Other which....let me draw near and touch it."

It is precisely the "otherness" of animals (rather than
their similarity to humans) that should provoke in us a sense of awe and
wonder. In their very unlikeness, animals offer us an opportunity to
"touch" another world.

One doesn't have to hear voices in the night to realize
this, but I can say in all honesty that when it does happen, "our" world
seems vastly smaller than before.

The Rev. Professor Andrew Linzey is Senior Research
Fellow in Theology and Animals, Blackfriars hall, University of Oxford,
England. The American edition of his book Animal Gospel is published by
Westminster/John Knox Press.

The leader of the Church of England, the Archbishop of
Canterbury, the Most Rev. Dr. George Carey, has bestowed a Doctor of
Divinity (DD) degree upon animal theologian Professor Andrew Linzey "in
recognition of his unique and massive pioneering contribution at a
scholarly level in the area of the theology of creation, with particular
reference to the rights and welfare of God's sentient creatures." Rarely
given, the DD degree is the highest award that an archbishop can grant a
theologian; never before has one been bestowed in the field of animal
rights. Commented Linzey, "I never supposed for a moment that anyone in
the Church would recognize my work for animals, not least of all because
I have been an outspoken critic of the Church's indifference to
animals....I hope the emerging generation of scholars working in t his
area will be as heartened as I am by this recognition.

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